Julian Glover interviews three founders of the SDP | Politics | The Guardian Close The following apology was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday January 25 2005 In early editions of G2 a reference in a biographical note about Denis Healey below referred to the late wife of the former Labour leader Michael Foot as Jill Tweedie. The surname was added in the editing. It was corrected in time for all other editions to Jill Craigie. Many apologies (one of them to the author of the piece, Michael White). Twenty-five years ago today, late in the afternoon on a riverside street in east London, three men and one woman set out to change the course of British politics. Standing on a rusty bridge by the Thames, Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams produced a short, typed statement. The words were hardly memorable, despite the 18 drafts it had taken to produce the final speech. But their ambition was huge and the consequences remain controversial today.

The Limehouse Declaration, as the statement became known, led not just to the launch of the Social Democratic Party, a brief, blazing meteorite that promised much more than it ever delivered, but laid the path for New Labour, the Liberal Democrats and, perhaps, Cameron's Conservatives as well. Some claim that the shape of modern British politics was forged that day. Others argue the party was just a flash in the pan that faded almost as soon as it was created. Labour, which the SDP aimed to replace, actually recovered. And after two thwarted general elections and little more than six years, the SDP collapsed in an unhappy confusion, its forces scattered and the "gang of four" that founded it split apart. The sadness over what happened then has lasted almost two decades. The split between Lord Owen and his allies has been one of the lasting animosities of British politics. But this week the three survivors - Lord Jenkins died in 2003 - gathered once again in Limehouse, meeting in an upstairs room in Owen's house, the spot where they once thought they would break the mould of politics in this country.

It was their first reunion since Owen broke away in 1988, and the wounds of that split are only just starting to heal. "That was the longest conversation I have had with David since 1987," Lord Rodgers said as he returned to Westminster. "We didn't speak for 10 years, apart from to say, 'Morning David, Morning Bill,' as we passed." They will meet again in Limehouse tonight, at a party that will not only bring together the SDP's founders but which marks the party's slow transition from contemporary controversy to historical fact. In the quarter century since 1981, east London, like Britain, has been transformed. Derelict warehouses and cobbled streets have given way to expensive new flats. Canary Wharf towers over the area and luxury German cars line the streets. The conditions that gave birth to the SDP, and the challenges it faced, seem far away. But as they walked down Narrow Street this week to revisit the spot where they once posed for pictures, the gang of three still shared the spirit that first brought them together.

As they stood by the Thames, leaving a space to mark the place left vacant by Jenkins' death, there was an edgy awareness that between them they had achieved something great. A quarter of a century ago, they gathered on a Sunday morning with a draft of a statement but no firm plans. Even the choice of Limehouse was an accident. Rodgers' wife Silvia had refused to let them meet in her house in north London: "Otherwise they might have issued the Kentish Town Communique - which I shall always regret," she says. The scene had been set by a decision the day before at a Labour special conference in Wembley to give the unions great power over choosing a leader. The gang of four were determined to fight back. The result was a long day of discussion and pages of drafts scrawled with handwritten amendments. The house was packed, not just with the main players but with aides such as Roger Liddle, now a key aide to Peter Mandelson, and Owen's wife, Debbie. As time wore on, and after a cold lunch of cheese and salad and wine, Lady Williams went downstairs for an interview with the BBC's World At One. "We sat up here listening to it," remembers Owen.

"When she came back up we all burst out laughing because she had committed herself to realignment, a word she didn't like. It was far tougher than the statement we had in front of us. You couldn't have listened to her without thinking she was leaving the Labour party." After that, he recalls, the declaration was complete. It was typed downstairs by Debbie Owen and then photocopied at the Savoy - parliament was closed and copying machines were less common in the East End than they are today. As they prepared for the press, Williams changed her blouse, borrowing one from Debbie ("It didn't fit," she says). Rodgers stuck resolutely to an old woolly jumper. He might have worn a suit had he known what was to follow. "We opened the door and saw the whole Fleet Street pack of photographers," says Owen. "We couldn't fit them into the house. That's why we headed outside, to go and find a place to launch the declaration." "It was much more immediate than we expected, the explosive response caught us off balance," says Williams. Their picture was on the front page of every national paper the next day and public letters of support flooded in.

A full-page advertisement in the Guardian a fortnight later brought 25,000 replies. Williams opened her front door one morning to find whole mailbags had been left outside. Yet the SDP was not quite born on January 25. The Limehouse Declaration was the definitive moment in the creation of the new party, but its birth pains had long been obvious and it was not set up for another nine weeks. For a little while longer, as Williams puts it, "We kept the road open back to where we had come from." Psychologically, though, the divorce from Labour was made final that day. It was the culmination of a miserable tearing apart that had taken months. "It was very depressing and very troubled, very painful," says Rodgers. "It was traumatic," says Owen. "I was emotionally part of the Labour party. People say it was easier for me than the others - but it wasn't." For weeks beforehand the gang had been meeting in each other's houses over wine and food, as Labour seemed to move relentlessly to the control of the far left. The sense of plotting and secrecy made them a national sensation.

"We kept trying to shake off the press, because we were desperate to have a chance to talk, to steer the next few days," says Williams, whose growing anger with the press attention led her to run into one private dinner hiding her face with a newspaper. This was the climax of a slow process of separation that started in the summer of 1980, as Labour began to tear itself apart after losing power. In a joint statement in the Guardian, what was then the gang of three called for "an acceptable socialist alternative". The word socialist mattered: the party, at its birth at least, aimed to be a socialist one. It was only later, after 1983, as Owen led it towards what he calls the "tough centre", that it emerged as something recognisably close to New Labour (ironically, one of the names, along with Radical, that the founders had considered calling the new party before settling on Social Democratic Party). "I had a growing sense of doom," says Williams. "It's why our language became more and more sharp.

It is as if you could make the words burn enough, you could burn through the complacency." She recalls reading a book on the Nazi seizure of power, and drawing grim parallels with what was happening to Labour. Others, of course, saw things differently, not least Denis Healey, a Labour moderate who stuck with his party to the great disappointment of the allies who founded the SDP. He still says his friends should have stuck with Labour and fought. By autumn 1980, three became four as Lord Jenkins, whose separation from Labour was much more complete, joined the gang. Now, some of those involved wonder whether the seeds of the SDP's failure were laid then. "The gang of three had a sense of solidarity with one another that was not fully shared with Roy," says Williams, who says that she none the less admired him as a radical. All of those involved were wary that he was older and closer to the Liberal leader David Steel than they were. Even at the time the gang of four was not a united team. "We all had our own individual views, we had come from different roots," says Rodgers. "I didn't like the suggestion that Roy was summoning us.

Shirley and David much preferred the gang of three." That sense of different destinations was to grow in the months after the party launched in the spring of 1981. From the outside, the public saw a political sensation, using up-to-date tricks such as credit cards and computers. Thousands of people came to meetings across the country; many of them joined up. But underneath there was already tension at the top over what to do about the Liberal party. Seeing themselves as socialists, the gang had resisted joining the Liberals, but faced competing with them for the centre ground. Owen, having just started one new party, did not want to subsume it into an immediate alliance, but within weeks of the SDP's birth it was already in formal alliance with the Liberals. "We lost our identity," he says. He wanted to "smash" them, he now says, then negotiate from strength. His colleagues did not agree. Though the SDP climbed in the polls, to more than 50% by the end of 1981, reports of disputes were becoming public. That didn't stop their dreams. "We really did see the possibility of winning the next election," says Rodgers.

"I was certainly clear in my own mind that I would really rather like to be chancellor of the exchequer. All of a sudden we thought, it's tomorrow, wow." Williams says she was never convinced, despite returning to parliament in November 1981 (she had lost her Labour seat in 1979) at a sensational byelection in Crosby. "I remember wincing when David Steel made that famous remark about preparing for government [at party conference in 1981]," she says. And already the party was being mocked as a middle-class breakaway, "all claret and chips", though its founders insist that is a caricature. Their weekly dinners in a private room at L'Amico restaurant in Westminster did not do much to overturn it. What is agreed is that by 1982 the golden days were already over. The economy began to recover, then Britain went to war with Argentina. A not unrealistic hope that they might be able to push Labour into third in the general election was shattered by the Tories' resurgence after the war. "It all fizzled away after the Falklands," says Rodgers.

The 1983 election was still a triumph in one way - the party ran Labour close in terms of votes, but not seats. Williams and Rodgers were defeated. In 1987, after four years led by Owen, the result was much the same. Soon after, the SDP merged with the Liberals to form the Liberal Democrats, though Owen battled on alone for another parliament before his breakaway was beaten in a Merseyside byelection by the Monster Raving Loony party. Today, the three survivors disagree sharply about what went wrong. Rodgers and Williams, both in the Lib Dems, say the SDP did not die but was reborn. "The Liberal Democrats are the direct descendants of these two parties, we are entitled to say this is what the SDP changed into and this is what it is," says Williams. Owen, of course, doesn't think there's much of the party he founded in today's Lib Dems, believing its political energy was channelled elsewhere into the Tories and, above all, New Labour. Tony Blair, he says, was fascinated by the party and what he could learn from it.

The really thorny question that none of them can answer is whether the gang of four helped produce or delayed Labour's renewal. "We all really had in mind the modern Labour party," says Williams - though she is a fierce critic of much that Blair has done in power. Owen says that he would "never" have considered leaving New Labour, but says the SDP still helped force its creation. He met Blair in 1996 to talk about rejoining. That came to nothing, as did an earlier proposal that he endorse Labour in 1992 in return for a clear run against two SDP MPs. So knowing what they know now, would the gang of four still break away? They all say yes. Leaving, they argue, drove Labour back to sanity and built three-party politics. It's a reasonable claim, but it wasn't why they did it. As they celebrate in Limehouse tonight - whether over claret or champagne - they can reflect on a political gamble that so nearly paid off.

Denis Healy At 88, Denis Healey reports that he is still "full of beans", but he has not modified the view he took in 1981 of plans to form a breakaway Social Democratic Party as he tried to persuade old friends such as Shirley Williams not to leave Labour. "I knew and liked all the people involved. But by taking some of the best people out of the Labour party they just gave Mrs Thatcher three terms in office. They delayed the modernisation of the Labour party and put Margaret Thatcher in for all that time," Lord Healey says. Not only did the defection of what eventually totalled 29 Labour MPs, one third of the moderate Manifesto Group, help to weaken and fragment the progressive centre to the advantage of the Tories, it meant that "extreme leftists were in charge of the Labour party during Michael Foot's leadership," said Healey. Foot had originally declined to stand and when asked why he had changed his mind, famously replied that his beloved wife, Jill Craigie, would "never forgive me" if he didn't. "Jill later realised she'd made a mistake," Healey claims.

Defeated by Foot in the 1980 leadership contest - the last to be conducted solely by MPs - the former chancellor went on to serve as his deputy in opposition and narrowly beat off Tony Benn's challenge for the No 2 job the following autumn, when leftwing realists and future modernisers such as Neil Kinnock refused to back Benn. Healey, a former international secretary of the party well versed in postwar European politics, says: "The great thing was that if you followed what was happening on the continent you saw that in places like France and Italy rightwing breakaways from the socialist parties turned the socialist parties left and put the conservatives in." Apologists for the SDP insist that only the shock of their departure forced Labour to confront its own demons and reconnect with both the electorate and market economics. Healey, criticised by his friends at the time for not taking the SDP threat seriously enough, insists that is not true. "The Labour party was going to do that anyway.

At the time, I argued with Shirley Williams that if they only waited a few months, we would have a sensible Labour party once good trade unionists had been elected to the NEC [Labour's then-powerful National Executive Committee] which was responsible for party organisation. That was the real tragedy." Michael White The Guardian: How the split led to cold-shouldering at Farringdon Road No wonder the SDP split from Labour also caused trouble at the Guardian. In the days before wall-to-wall mass media and 24/7 TV news channels, when the rest of pre-Wapping Fleet Street was solidly Thatcherite except for the Mirror and Observer, it was the crucial battleground. Active Tories were few on the ground at the paper, but the Labour-voting majority was offset by historic ties with the Liberal party (CP Scott was a Liberal MP) and strong editorial sympathy for the reformist agenda of Labour's Healey-Hattersley-Shirley Williams tendency. There was also a Bennite /Left faction. David McKie, then deputy editor, records in his diaries an outburst by David Owen at Labour's pre-split 1980 conference: "The paper is hopelessly wet and ambivalent. It has no backbone ...

say what you like about the Daily Mail, they are a commitment newspaper," Owen told him. Nevertheless, it was natural that the manifesto should be launched in the Guardian. As the drama of the split unfolded, it led to shouting and cold-shouldering at the paper's HQ in Farringdon Road, Clerkenwell, where the paper is still based. One fraught meeting in the office of the then editor, Peter Preston, felt like a show trial to Ian Aitken, my mentor and predecessor as political editor, as his attempts to defend the Labour leadership of his old friend Michael Foot were attacked from left and right. Leading waverers who defected included columnist Polly Toynbee and three of the four leader-writers: Malcolm Dean (still in the same role), Chris Huhne (now an MP and running for the Lib Dem leadership) and John Torode, former labour editor. All four were to run (and lose) as SDP candidates in the 1983 general election. So did another reporter, Jim Lewis, who ran as a Liberal.

Polly's husband, the late Peter Jenkins, then Fleet Street's most influential columnist on the left, had been among the first to realise that the long-threatened split might really happen. On the far left were people such as John Palmer, the paper's financial editor, who had been expelled as a Labour candidate for Trotskyism in the mid-60s. Most conspicuously holding the fort for Labour was political editor Ian Aitken, supported, among others, by the labour editor, the late Keith Harper, and columnist Melanie Phillips (who has since staged her own defection to the Mail). Another spear-carrier was the parliamentary sketchwriter: myself. We dismissed our left critics as unworldly "public school Trots" - since their numbers included graduates of Eton, Winchester and Roedean - while warning the SDP defectors that they would not be able to replace Labour in its heartlands. And the Guardian? Its Lib-Lab traditions prevailed. It gave the Liberal-SDP Alliance and their goals encouragement, not outright support. A generation later, the old faultlines are still visible, awaiting the next eruption.

MW Limehouse Declaration - Wikisource, the free online library Limehouse Declaration Roy Jenkins , David Owen , Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams The Limehouse Declaration was a statement issued on 25 January 1981 by Roy Jenkins , David Owen , Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams , all senior British Labour politicians and former Cabinet Ministers . In this document the so-called 'Gang of Four' signalled their intent to leave the Labour Party and form a Council for Social Democracy . This Council became the basis for the British Social Democratic Party (SDP). 692224Limehouse Declaration Roy Jenkins , David Owen , Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams The calamitous outcome of the Labour Party Wembley conference demands a new start in British politics. A handful of trade union leaders can now dictate the choice of a future Prime Minister. The conference disaster is the culmination of a long process by which the Labour Party has moved steadily away from its roots in the people of this country and its commitment to parliamentary government. We propose to set up a Council for Social Democracy. Our intention is to rally all those who are committed to the values, principles and policies of social democracy. We seek to reverse Britain’s economic decline.

We want to create an open, classless and more equal society, one which rejects ugly prejudices based upon sex, race or religion. A first list of those who have agreed to support the council will be announced at an early date. Some of them have been actively and continuously engaged in Labour politics. A few were so engaged in the past, but have ceased to be so recently. Others have been mainly active in spheres outside party politics. We do not believe the fight for the ideals we share and for the recovery of our country should be limited only to politicians. It will need the support of men and women in all parts of our society. The council will represent a coming together of several streams: politicians who recognise that the drift towards extremism in the Labour Party is not compatible with the democratic traditions of the party they joined and those from outside politics who believe that the country cannot be saved without changing the sterile and rigid framework into which the British political system has increasingly fallen in the last two decades. We do not believe in the politics of an inert centre merely representing the lowest common denominator between two extremes. We want more, not less, radical change in our society, but with a greater stability of direction.

Our economy needs a healthy public sector and a healthy private sector without frequent frontier changes. We want to eliminate poverty and promote greater equality without stifling enterprise or imposing bureaucracy from the centre. We need the innovating strength of a competitive economy with a fair distribution of rewards. We favour competitive public enterprise, co-operative ventures and profit sharing. There must be more decentralisation of decision making in industry and government, together with an effective and practical system of democracy at work. The quality of our public and community services must be improved and they must be made more responsive to people’s needs. We do not accept that mass unemployment is inevitable. A number of countries, mainly those with social democratic governments, have managed to combine high employment with low inflation. Britain needs to recover its self-confidence and be outward-looking, rather than isolationist, xenophobic or neutralist. We want Britain to play a full and constructive role within the framework of the European Community, Nato, the United Nations and the Commonwealth. It is only within such a multi-lateral framework that we can hope to negotiate international agreements covering arms control and disarmament and to grapple effectively with the poverty of the Third World.

We recognise that for those people who have given much of their lives to the Labour Party, the choice that lies ahead will be deeply painful. But we believe that the need for a realignment of British politics must now be faced. The legacy of the SDP's Gang of Four - BBC News BBC News The legacy of the SDP's Gang of Four By Shaun Ley Presenter, Breaking the Mould 12 January 2011 Image caption The "Gang of Four" in Limehouse in 1981 There's no equivalent of the blue plaque for heroic failures. If there was, the small iron canal bridge next to the Thames at Limehouse in east London might qualify for a memorial. On 25 January 1981 four politicians - three of them Labour MPs, the fourth the former deputy leader of the party and all of them ex-cabinet ministers - posed for photographs on the bridge. The Limehouse Declaration was the first public move towards creating the Social Democratic Party. The SDP existed for less than a decade, but its influence is still felt today. The immediate cause was Labour's decision to give party members and the unions a say in electing the party's leader. The left no longer trusted MPs to do it.

One member, one vote The gang of four, as they became known, believed that unless this electoral college guaranteed one member, one vote, the real decision would be handed to union officials and far left activists who had taken over local parties. David Owen still lives in Limehouse, in the house where the gang of four met. The electoral college, he says, is the stumbling block preventing him from returning to the Labour Party. Although "one member, one vote" is now the rule, you do not actually need to belong to the party to vote, and some people have multiple votes. Image caption Shaun Ley joined Lord Owen in Limehouse, where he still lives Today, it seems odd to get hung-up about non-party members having a say. The fashion is for "primaries", used by the Conservatives to choose some of their MPs, in which local people took part, whether they were Tory members or not. But Lord Owen points to the embarrassment caused to Ed Miliband, who won the Labour leadership because he had a commanding lead among the union members, even though his brother was the first choice of MPs and Labour's rank and file. Lord Owen speaks warmly of Miliband, and told me "my heart belongs to Labour".

By-election wipeout He would like to see a Labour government elected in 2015, or a coalition between it and the Liberal Democrats, the party which the other members of the gang of four helped to create, after much of the SDP merged with the Liberals in 1988. FIND OUT MORE Breaking the Mould: Radio 4 documentary looking back at BBC archives Presented by Shaun Ley Catch up via iPlayer Lord Owen resisted merger, but in one way, they were right and he was wrong. The Liberal Democrats grew into a formidable political force, the SDP withered, finally extinguished after a humiliating seventh place finish in a by-election in 1990, behind the Monster Raving Loony Party. The SDP legacy can be found in the coalition. Liberal Democrats such as Vince Cable and Chris Huhne are former members, as are the Health Secretary Andrew Lansley and Greg Clark, the local government minister, both of whom are Conservatives. But more important for Lord Owen is that politics today is less tribal than it was in 1981. He credits the SDP.

Others dispute that; but unquestionably the political horizon looks different standing on the Limehouse Bridge now than it did 30 years ago. What today’s politicians can learn from the Gang of Four 27 January 2011 What today’s politicians can learn from the Gang of Four The effects of the Limehouse Declaration, which led to the creation of the Social Democratic Party, are still being felt. Sign up for our weekly email * The seed for the emergence of the Social Democratic Party was planted on 12 December 1978. The prime minister, Jim Callaghan, was discussing nuclear strategy with Denis Healey, Fred Mulley and me in the cabinet room. Suddenly Michael Foot and John Silkin, the chief whip, burst in to announce that the Tribune Group of left-wing Labour MPs had just decided to vote that evening against economic sanctions on the Ford Motor Company after it agreed a 17 per cent pay increase with the Transport and General Workers Union. We discussed whether we should make the debate a vote of confidence and how, if we lost, the general election would have to take place in January.

Foot was implacably against making it a vote of confidence; Healey was for (he was later joined in this stance by Roy Hattersley, who would have had to announce it at the start of the debate). In the event, Callaghan sidestepped a confrontation, even though he knew he would have had my support and almost certainly Mulley's, too. We lost the vote that night by 285 to 283. The government immediately tabled a motion of confidence, which was debated the next day, and we survived with a majority of ten. Yet sanctions were like a finger in the dyke - once they were removed, the whole edifice of trade-union-supported pay restraint collapsed. We were into the "Winter of Discontent" and doomed to lose the election whenever it was called. Over the next two years the power structures inside the Labour Party changed. Foot and the trade union leaders were in the ascendant. Callaghan unwisely delayed resigning immediately after losing the May 1979 election, undermining Healey's chances of leading the party.

By the time of the special party conference at Wembley on 24 January 1981, with Foot now party leader, Tony Benn had succeeded in committing the Labour Party to fighting the next general election on four ruinous policies: withdrawal from the European Community, without even the referendum that Labour had given the country in 1975; unilateral nuclear disarmament, previously adopted by the Labour conference in 1960, but reversed in 1961; a return to the wholesale nationalisation and state interference in the economy enshrined in Clause Four of Labour's constitution; and changes aimed at substantially reducing the power of the parliamentary party by introducing an electoral college for electing Labour's leader, while specifically rejecting one member, one vote. Meeting at my house in Limehouse, east London, the next day, Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins, Bill Rodgers and I were in no doubt that these policies would not be changed before the next election. And we knew that many Labour supporters would find it impossible to campaign on a manifesto that contained them.

Naturally, politics involves give and take, and it was not unreasonable for those on the left to try to shift the balance of power in the party closer to their views in the aftermath of electoral defeat. But this was no minor shift. It was designed as a fundamental challenge to Labour as a party of responsible government - to the party of Attlee, Bevin, Gaitskell, Bevan, Wilson and Callaghan. In the Limehouse Declaration, we spelled out an alternative, what we called a "realignment of British politics". It was, for me - and, I think, for the others - a deeply emotional occasion. I owed much to the Labour Party. Without it I would never have served in government. [W]e do not believe in the politics of an inert centre, merely representing the lowest common denominator between two extremes. We want more, not less, radical change in our society, but with greater stability of direction. Our economy needs a healthy public sector and healthy private sector, without frequent frontier changes. We want to eliminate poverty and promote greater equality without stifling enterprise or imposing bureaucracy from the centre. We need the innovating strength of a competitive economy with a fair distribution of rewards.

We favour competitive public enterprise, co-operative ventures and profit-sharing. There must be more decentralisation of decision-making in industry and government, together with an effective and practical system of democracy at work. It is hard to recall exactly what we hoped for. I never thought the SDP would govern alone in its own right or that we would be able to batter our way through to power quickly. But I did hope that we would be part of a coalition government within my working lifetime and that I might have the opportunity of being in charge of a department again. I knew I could never expect to be prime minister, because in leaving the Labour Party I had given up whatever slight chance I may have had of becoming its leader. But over the past 30 years I have felt at various times that the creation of the SDP had unleashed forces far more powerful and potentially important than anything I had ever seen stemming directly from the Labour Party - or indeed any of the major political parties - all of which I think we have at some stage influenced, and for the better.

Realignment effect No fair-minded person reading the Limehouse Declaration today can doubt that the SDP's message still has resonance, even after 13 years of Labour government and eight months of a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition. The SDP believed that multiparty politics was coming to the UK, whether the politicians liked it or not, and that working across parties and being ready to form coalitions would become the norm, reinforced by having a fair proportional voting system. Such a combination was then, and still is, commonplace in the countries that now form the European Union. Not for nothing did the SDP champion the case for Scottish and Welsh devolution in a way that Labour had never done. A joint SDP-Liberal Party commission chose proportional representation through the single transferable vote, and rejected the Alternative Vote (AV), for electing the Westminster parliament. We also supported comprehensive reform of the trade unions throughout the 1980s. Most of these core SDP attitudes were eventually adopted by Labour during its 18 long years in opposition.

It should be said, however, that Labour was forced back into sanity not by the SDP alone, but also by the MPs who stayed to fight from within, such as Healey, Hattersley, John Smith and - in his 1985 confrontation with Militant - Neil Kinnock. After 1994, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown created what they called "New Labour", a name originally considered for our nascent party. Labour's adoption of SDP policies continued, and many more SDP members started to return to Labour, or else joined it for the first time. By 1987, many SDP members had built cross- party friendships, as well as policies, with the Liberals. Nevertheless, the party did its own cause a great disservice by agreeing to a merger that would deprive members elected as SDP MPs and councillors of the right to continue as such. The proposed merger that it involved rested on the belief that the Conservative-Labour duopoly could only be challenged by a single third party, with the implication that the alliance had been a failure.

Yet in Wales and Scotland four parties already existed, and following devolution in the late 1990s, cross-party arrangements and coalitions became the norm in their parliaments. We would, I believe, have had a hung parliament in 1992 if the alliance had remained in existence. By 2009, I was convinced this would be the likely outcome of a 2010 election and helped create Charter 2010 to educate the public about hung parliaments. The coalition made possible by the electoral arithmetic last May will come under considerable strain in 2011, particularly in Scotland, and Ed Miliband must be ready by 2012 for a possible rupturing of it. According to Anthony Seldon's recent book Brown at 10, the then prime minister offered the Liberal Democrats a referendum on voting reform with three options, one of which was full proportional representation. It would be refreshing if Miliband, who has already said he supports AV, backed an amendment in the House of Lords providing for a third option of proportional representation in the forthcoming referendum.

He is realistic enough to accept that many Labour members will still support first-past-the-post, but he should not line Labour up alongside the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in trying to fix the referendum so as to exclude the option of proportional representation. Fixes between political parties are part of politics, but referendums are different. By and large, politicians choose to call them for two reasons only: if the constitutional issues involved are are major and if there are deep divisions within their own party. But once the referendum mechanism is chosen, for whatever reason, there is a democratic obligation to let the voters choose between all the available options. Market manoeuvres It is encouraging that Miliband has started to win back for Labour a position of principle on civil liberty issues that was virtually destroyed by Blair. Shortening detention without charge, coming out against ID cards and refusing to identify with Blair's attitude to the very Freedom of Information legislation that Labour introduced, Miliband has struck a very different tone. It would have been ludicrous for Labour to have allowed itself to be outflanked in these areas by the coalition. It also needs to identify more with public concern at ever greater European integration and stop flirting with membership of the eurozone.

Furthermore, the Liberal Democrats' self-inflicted wound of not sticking to their own coalition agreement, which allowed them to abstain on the withdrawal of 80 per cent central government financial support for higher education and the trebling of student tuition fees, is an opportunity for Labour. It is right to examine a student graduate tax as the medium-term best option. It was championed by the SDP in the late 1980s and remains the fairest and best way for UK students in English universities to pay back their individual fees to society for the public good of a higher education without incurring huge levels of debt. There are many other SDP policies that Labour should be re-examining, along with scrapping its electoral college and using a one member, one vote system for electing the party leader. One pressing matter is the coalition's surprising endorsement of proposals by the Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, for an external market in the NHS - a potentially huge change. I write as the person who advocated within the SDP, and won reluctant acceptance in the alliance, for an internal market in the Health Service.

It was essential that people working in the NHS who were making decisions involving millions of pounds became more aware of the financial implications of what they were doing. However, the internal market is not the same as an external market. It was never en­visaged that decisions should be taken solely on competitive and financial grounds, without regard for the obligation to provide the best possible medical care. Ironically, the SDP's internal market was attacked by Margaret Thatcher before and during the 1987 general election campaign. Yet one of its logical implications, GP fund-holding, was wisely introduced by John Major's government. And in most cases it proved to be highly satisfying for the GPs involved and beneficial for their patients. There is growing anxiety within the coalition that Lansley's reforms will prompt the public to hold the government responsible for anything and everything that goes wrong in the NHS. No wonder David Cameron is worried. And no wonder Liberal Democrats, deeply committed to the NHS and historically sceptical even of an internal market, are beginning to question what they are being asked to support.

If the Liberal Democrats cannot call a halt to or, at the very least, slow down, these ill-conceived health reforms they will no longer be able to claim to be the heirs of Beveridge. Thirty years ago the SDP reversed the conventional political axiom "stick to your party, damn your principles". If anyone wants to go on pretending in 2011 that the creation of the SDP has not had a profound effect on British politics, they are free to do so, but they must be living on a different planet. David Owen was one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party. He sits in the House of Lords as a crossbencher. Lord Owen was Foreign Secretary 1977-79, a founder-member of the SDP and is now a crossbench peer. “Unelectable Corbyn”: Spot on comment from Calvin Tucker | 21centurymanifesto “Unelectable Corbyn”: Spot on comment from Calvin Tucker Home “Keep Corbyn and it will all end like it did with the unelectable Michael Foot!” is the media mantra. But what really happened to the Labour Party between 1981 and 1983? Here’s my take.

35 years ago, the so-called Gang of Four – Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Bill Rodgers, Shirley Williams – gathered at David Owen’s house in East London to issue the Limehouse Declaration and to announce their split from Labour, and the setting up of what was to become the Social Democratic Party, or SDP for short. Some of us are old enough to remember the tumultuous events which followed: the SDP’s media-fuelled rise in the polls and Labour’s subsequent defeat in the 1983 election. Others will have read about this period, but almost certainly from sources which frame the division as being ‘unelectable left wing extremists versus electable moderates’. What is less well known is that at the time of the split, the Labour Party under the leadership of Michael Foot enjoyed a huge lead in the polls.

The eleven national opinion polls conducted between 10 November 1980 when Foot won the leadership and the Limehouse Declaration on 25 January 1981, show Labour’s percentage of the vote as: 43, 50, 46.5, 47, 47, 48, 47.5, 56, 51, 47, 45. Labour’s lead over the Tories fluctuated between 7 and 24 percent, and on the day before the Limehouse Declaration, Foot’s Labour enjoyed a straight-up 10 point lead over Thatcher’s Tories (Mori, 24 Jan 1981). Whatever the SDP split was about, what it was not about was the supposed ‘unelectability’ of Michael Foot. That’s an example of history being rewritten to scare off Labour members from ever again electing a left-winger as Party leader. And to scare off the voters, if perchance the members ignored the supposed lessons of history. If anything, the reverse is true.

The split was in part prompted by the well-founded fear that Foot might in fact win an election on a program that the right in the party vehemently opposed and would not serve in government. It was only when the SDP began to take votes from Labour, that the ‘unelectability’ of Michael Foot became a self-fulfilling prophesy. Unelectability didn’t precipitate the split. The split precipitated the unelectability. But there’s no need to take it from me. This is from the opening statement of the 1983 SDP manifesto: “By 1987, if we continue as we are, unemployment will be at least as bad as in 1983. As a reaction, if the old two-party system is allowed to continue, we shall then lurch into the most extreme left-wing Government we have ever known.” Here’s Tony Blair on Corbyn, from July 2015: “Let me be absolutely clear: I wouldn’t want to win on an old-fashioned leftist platform. Even if I thought it was the route to victory, I wouldn’t take it.” Both the SDP splitters and Blair oppose the left on principle, and they are refreshingly open about it.

It wasn’t then, and isn’t now, about “electability”. The 1982 Falklands War and the accompanying orgy of flag-waving chauvinism (which Foot was powerless to prevent) led to a spike in the Tory vote to 45%+ in the polls; a high watermark which the Labour Party, now fighting on two flanks, could not hope to reach. What became of the SDP and its pretensions to govern Britain? Well, having delivered the coup de gras to Michael Foot in the ’83 election as one half of the SDP – Liberal Alliance, they formally merged with the Liberals, their strategic usefulness to the right wing establishment exhausted. David Owen led a rump of anti-merger SDPists from unelectability to extinction. The fitting epitaph being the the night-of-the-living-dead in the 1990 Bootle by-election, when the zombie SDP was beaten into seventh place by the candidate from the Monster Raving Loony Party.

Not being a loony himself, Owen sensibly wound up the SDP shortly afterwards and re-entered parliament, this time as a job-for-life unelected member of the House of Lords, where he sits as an ‘independent social democrat’, whatever that means. He was the future once. Shirley Williams’ political journey ended with her joining the Conservative coalition, and in the House of Lords voting to push through the Health and Social Care Bill which opened up Labour’s 1945 crowning glory, the NHS, to privatisation. Roy Jenkins died in 2003, and Bill Rodgers wrote a book. Does any of this matter except to historians and political nerds? I would argue that it does. Arguments about the past matter because they are really debates about the present and the future. Calvin Tucker works at the Morning Star Like this:

Question: The Limehouse Declaration of 1981 created what?
Answer: Social Democratic Party